It’s odd how a Nevada businesswoman winning county approval to employ male prostitutes has suddenly make Heidi Fleiss look like a visionary.

But first I have to say how difficult this is for me. You see, I recall seeing Heidi in her father’s office in the early 1980s. She was a sweet-faced, skinny teen with a pony tail back then and her father, Dr. Paul Fleiss, was our first child’s pediatrician.

Being a natural-born Polyanna, I just couldn’t believe the lurid stories that surfaced in 1993 when the “high class” prostitution ring she was running won her the bawdy title Hollywood Madame.

But how the law and the press could throw the term “high class” around while talking about prostitution was a mystery to me. Selling human bodies for cash is not, by the very nature of the transaction, high class.

Face it, this might be the world’s oldest known paid occupation, but it is a bottom-of-the-barrel one for everyone involved, no matter how young, pretty and high class.

This is especially true when the name Charlie Sheen appears in conjunction with a case that got Fleiss sent up on three counts of pandering.

This “high-class,” high school dropout from the upper reaches of the Los Feliz District received what is called the maximum minimum, three years in prison. That and two more trials. The first was a 1996 appeal that she won when the jury admitted to vote-trading. While the third was the far less jokey federal charge of money laundering and tax evasion that got her 37 months in the slammer up in Dublin, Ca.

Still, it is part of a strange sexual double standard that Sheen and all the other wealthy men who paid for illegal sex got into no trouble at all. In fact, Sheen’s career thrived even after he admitted in court to paying the so-called Hollywood Madame $53,000 for (isn’t this sanitary sounding?) “sexual services.”

Upon her release, Fleiss opened a lingerie shop on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. Failing at that, she seemed to be breaking new ground in 2005 with a move to the unfortunately named town of Pahrump in southern Nye County, Nevada. There she planned to open a male brothel.

The move brought her yet more of the bad-girl media attention that she seems to crave. But the idea didn’t pan out. And it only took a glance at Fleiss’ sad emotional and physical condition during a documentary taped that same year to see why.

She was also barred, and why does this seem contradictory in the only state that allows prostitution, from operating a male bordello because of her felony conviction.

The old-time Mafia dons are laughing in their graves.

For reasons that are not terribly clear, prostitution is only legal in Nevada counties with populations of less than 100,000. This makes Nye the brothel-allowing county closest to Las Vegas, a city where one can’t walk as many as five steps without being handed a lurid business card advertising outcall “escorts.”

Immediately after being granted permission to add male sex workers to the Shady Lady Ranch near Beatty at last week’s meeting of the Nye County Licensing and Liquor Board, owner Bobbi Davis began casting about for recruits.

According to an article in the Pahrump Valley Times, the ranch – which currently employs four women – needs a “few good men” between the ages of 21 and 40 who are “service-minded and willing to please.” Aside from the obvious disregard of federal and state age-bias laws – I was going to apply, but why bother when 100 younger men are already in line ahead of me? – “service-minded” and “willing to please” are not words that spring to mind when speaking of males and sex.

So it is truly special men – outgoing and affectionate men – that the brothel needs, men who will also undergo weekly urethral exams to test for gonorrhea and chlamydia and weekly blood tests for HIV to comply with Nevada Administrative Code 441A.800.

This in addition to gaining the medical skills required, same as with their female counterparts, to check clients for signs of sexually transmitted diseases.

Yes, this does sound every bit as clinical and nasty as it probably will be. But it is not as revolutionary as it first seems. In fact, a similar but short-lived experiment – there were no takers – was tried in Nevada during the early 1960s.

Mind you, gender-neutral wording of laws to accommodate male sex workers has for some time been used in Europe and Australia. Only this is America, where a certain Puritan ethic comes into play even among people who sell sex.

Meanwhile, brothel lobbyist George Flint told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the whole idea is doomed, explaining, “Women won’t come in for a quickie. They’re not jackrabbits like men are.”

Fleiss also went on record last week to say that this small effort to give women equal access to paid sex would fail: “Why would you drive out there when you can go on craigslist? No woman wants to get it that bad.”

Yeah, Heidi!

And that’s just one of the problems that makes this such an interesting question. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe you can help me with an answer at the e-mail address below, but the biggest dividing line between the sexes remains (as always) sex itself.

It’s a matter of who wants it more and when and with whom. It’s a matter of discrimination and our natural physical differences. In short, and morality aside (morality and the gag reflex), it would probably take a special male to fake it even with the help of modern pharmacology and pneumatics.

A woman I know, a medical professional specializing in women’s reproductive health (who doesn’t at all trust visual STD exams), maybe summed it up best when she joked, “It’s about time women got fair treatment. I know that I’d do it if they included a pedicure.”

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